Christoffer C. Eriksen

Education for Sustainable Development and International Student Assessments: Governing Education in Times of Climate Change

At the end of the UNs Decade of Education for Sustainable Development there are few, if any, indications of comprehensive educational reforms meeting the challenges of sustainable development. Rather, a central aim for current educational reforms appears to be improvement of student performance on national and international educational assessments, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)s Programme for International Student Assessments (PISA). Against this background, this article explores the relationship between the UNs measures to promote education for sustainable development (ESD) and the OECDs measures to assist the development of education policy through PISA. The article finds that there are asymmetries in the ways these two different measures shape education systems. Moreover, the article also finds tensions between the educational practices associated with ESD, and those associated with ambitions to improve scores on PISA and other tests.

Constraining Administrative Discretion to Facilitate Renewable Energy: Wind Farms as a Challenge for EU Law and the European Commission

Wind farm projects have generated conflicts between a range of different interests. In the European Union (EU), the Renewables Directive sets out rules that have implications for how these conflicts are to be handled in the Member States. As interpreted by the European Commission, these rules obstruct the possibility of handling these conflicts through negotiations, deliberations and the involvement of non-state actors. However, this interpretation lacks a clear legal basis, and may also generate more, not less, opposition against wind farm projects. Such opposition may delay and hamper the development of wind farm projects. This is counterproductive to the goals for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and increasing the use of renewable energy which the EU has set for the year 2020, and which the European Commission has recently proposed to set even higher for the year 2030.

Legitimacy and the Charter of Fundamental Rights Post-Lisbon

Has the incorporation of the Charter of Fundamental Rights into the Lisbon Treaty strengthened our reasons for accepting the powers entrusted to the European Union?—The Charter of Fundamental Rights was adopted and later transformed into primary law in order to enhance the legitimacy of the EU. This echoed a critique of the gradually expanding powers of the EU, including the expanding reach of the right to free movement, more supranational decision-making procedures, and new Union powers in novel policy areas such as the area of justice and home affairs. One line of criticism held that the wide powers of the Union were not balanced with a sufficient level of democratic control and effective protection against abuse. The Lisbon Treaty sought to enhance legitimacy in three ways: Decision-making processes were to some extent democratised; the Member States agreed that the Union shall accede to the ECHR; and the Charter was transformed into primary law. There is a partly competing perspective that posits that the EU’s legitimacy may depend more on its ability to facilitate effective problem-solving of acute public policy issues, including migration, terror, and economic crises. In this chapter, we analyse to what extent the transformation of the Charter into primary law has already succeeded, and may continue to succeed, in providing better reasons for accepting the powers entrusted to the EU. In this context, we provide, first, an analysis of certain questions regarding the interpretation and application of the Charter, questions which are key to assessing what changes to EU law the said transformation has led to and may lead to, as compared to older epochs of EU law, when fundamental rights were based on unwritten law. In the final assessment, we argue that the answer to the legitimacy question depends on the extent to which European courts will allow Member States flexibility regarding how fundamental rights are protected in different institutional environments. Effective problem-solving may require the ability to adapt different solutions to various locations and to different situations, based upon the weighing of diverse interests.